NONFICTION - May 21, 1995

INEVITABLE ILLUSIONS: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, translated by the author and Keith Botsford (John Wiley & Sons: $24.95; 242 pp.). The rift between science and the humanities has narrowed considerably over the last 35 years or so, since C.P. Snow laid it out in his famous 1959 lecture “Two Cultures.” But the rift is still there--and still leads to acrimony, as is evident in Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini’s “Inevitable Illusions.” Piattelli-Palmarini, a cognitive scientist at MIT, is not a conciliator; he is rather, an old-fashioned rationalist, intent on showing that in considering certain intellectual questions “reason is enslaved; it is forced to collaborate--to protect our illusions, to render them immune to verification.” That’s unquestionably true, and Piattelli-Palmarini discusses some familiar logical puzzles--the prisoner’s dilemma, the three-box game, the birthday-incidence problem, etc.--to make his points. Unlike Martin Gardner and John Allen Paulos, however, he rarely makes them effectively, for his prose can be so aggressive, so defensive and so universalizing--this from someone complaining about others’ unsound logic!--that many readers sympathetic to his central thesis will find themselves alienated.

Major portions of “Inevitable Illusions” are devoted to the layman’s confusion about probability, and his unwarranted confidence in intuitive judgments, but Piattelli-Palmarini often makes his case with problems so ill-written and incomplete that the supposedly deluded problem-solver has ended up pondering different, unstated questions. In an appendix he addresses criticism on this point from a deconstruction-influenced cognitive psychologist, but the author’s dismissive rejoinder just doesn’t wash. He seems to believe that language can express ideas with mathematical certainty, that misreadings are to be bemoaned rather than expected, and that’s simply not the way of the word.